Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  They wait a moment for the Smoke to thin within the crowd, then Meister Lukas splits the darkened stage with a single tongue of light. A lone actor walks out in it, carrying a basketful of clothes. It is hard to say whether it is a man or woman. Balthazar has picked a beardless young man, big-hipped and plump, who works as an iron smelter. The man understood at once what he was talking about. Now he stands in his everyday work clothes and begins to undress.

  It is a simple idea, the culmination of the evening’s logic. He strips, reaches into the basket he brought, and puts on a costume: becomes a Dark Miner; a butch woman Commissar; a moustachioed Shock Worker celebrity; a foreman’s bourgeois wife. And as he stands there changing over and over, cycling through the whole range of Minetowns’ fashion, transforming from man to woman over and over again, his movements become quicker, more agitated, lost between his roles.

  The scene is meant to resolve itself in a joke: the actor finds a Puritan’s black hat and coat in the box and dons it: becomes a southerner, a revanchist and Renfrewite, and skips happily—whistling—off the stage.

  But as it turns out the Puritan costume is missing from the basket; Meister Lukas’s mistake, it will turn out later, caused by the haste of moving the scene forward in its sequence. And thus something remarkable happens. The actor searches frantically for the costume that is not there. If his earlier agitation was mere mummery, he now grows genuinely distressed, an amateur betrayed by the professionals who lured him onstage. He stands arrested between costume changes, half woman, half man, no longer acting but himself. And then, his Smoke pouring out of him (or her?) in pure thick billows, he strips off all that remains upon his body, strips stark naked in the glare of Meister Lukas’s lights, hiding his sex in the cup of his two hands and staring boldly, blindly, into the light.

  His fatty skin throws folds upon the hairless chest.

  The ventilators catch the Smoke, carry it upwards, to the silenced crowd. It isn’t a pleasant Smoke: proud but also upsetting, flavoured with a question so existential that most of the Miners shrink from its disquiet and search instead for someone to blame. Soon boos ring through Ekklesia, carrying dark billows of ill will; people rise and want to leave, shouldering friends and comrades aside; others stand and block the exits, rooted to the spot by their own doubts.

  It feels like the beginning of a riot.

  Down below, in the darkness of the stage, stands Balthazar, two steps from the actor but beyond the strip of light. Black, smoking tears are running down his face. Etta May is there, soothing him, one hand upon his back.

  “Not everything can be a hit, hon.”

  But it isn’t that. The scene is the most personal thing he has ever staged. Balthazar sees himself in that wide-hipped, breastless figure with the too-round limbs, his skin turned ebony with Soot; sees himself exposed—caught between the sexes—while ten thousand people boo and jeer and wish above all not to know.

  “We must douse him,” Etta May urges. “Or else there will be violence. They’ll charge the stage.”

  “Let them charge.”

  Slowly, not knowing his own intention, Balthazar steps into the light next to the actor and begins unbuttoning his shirt.

  [ 18 ]

  When silence falls like the drop of an axe, he thinks it originates in him, in the shock of his bared chest. Wait until I get my pants off, it flashes through him, grim and irreverent, eyes blinded by the light.

  Then a child steps up and takes his hand.

  She comes from behind, not from the crowd whose voice has been so suddenly smothered, and brings along another stranger. In the glare of the stage lights, his hair burns like fire on his head.

  “Hullo,” says Charlie Cooper to the silenced crowd, sounding like a toff and rebel all at once. “I’m sorry to interrupt.”

  He pauses, looks down upon the girl, his cheeks hollow under a thick beard.

  “This here is little Mary from Butterwick. She brings a message from your children. From the Angel of the North.”

  And as she steps farther out into the light, fists on hips and scrawny in her filthy dress, Charlie draws back into the shadows and gives his body over to the brutal rattle of a sick man’s cough, almost drowning out the child.

  “LETTERS TO POSTERITY,” UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT BY ERASMUS RENFREW, PHILOSOPHIAE DOCTOR, LORD PROTECTOR OF THE REALM. “LETTER 17.” JUNE 1909.

  All my life I dreamt of a Republic of Virtue built upon the principles of reason and restraint. The passions could be mastered: through the power of will; through habituation. A good life—a good state—could be erected upon this mastery, a return to Eden. In this great endeavour, I believed Smoke to be our friend and guide, for it showed us when we erred. I enlisted science, that child of reason, and devised methods to tame the animal inside us. I placed childhood in a corrective harness; studied the rules of heredity and selection of species and came to believe that across the generations, the lustful and vicious could be bred out of our race—by edict, if necessary. In my vision, the distortions of social privilege would wither away alongside our base nature. To learn restraint meant to become rational; and to be rational meant to be successful, and to be unimpressed by pomp and empty titles. Thus a natural meritocracy would triumph and we would live as God intended us, both kind and free.

  Then came the moral catastrophe that was the Second Smoke. It brought something worse than immorality and violence—something worse than copulation, merrymaking, murder, rape. It brought a lie and spread it on the air like so much poison. It convinced our people that restraint was undesirable; that reason dehumanised us; that the ordered soul was sick and starved by self-negation. Compared to this lie’s ravages, the Storms themselves were nothing—all they did was kill.

  And so I did what few men do within their lifetimes. I changed my mind. And found my way back to God—not to the Deist First Mover that had for so long been in my arid prayers but to the God of the Jews, terrible in His aspect. Man must relearn what it means to fear. The Republic of Virtue will rise only out of abject terror—Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, my fellow dreamer of a better world, was not such a fool after all. We will have reason and merit. But first there must be war.

  I have no illusions that what I am about to do is a grave crime. The sacking of Jericho was a grave crime—every man and woman killed, every child and animal slaughtered, all but a single harlot left to mock the dead. The killing of Jesus was likewise a grave crime—the cross and the nails, the kiss and the spear. It was the price that was paid for resurrection.

  I must be our age’s Judas.

  My tree stands withered, waiting, a coil of blue intestine for a noose.

   IN HARNESS

  [ 1 ]

  Nil watches her from afar. In the corridor, or walking in the courtyard arm in arm with her uncle, while Renfrew is out on his daily constitutional. Nil has not spoken to Eleanor in days, nor passed a single note. Not since. Smith has been keeping him busy. Running errands, spying. It has made it easy to pretend he has not had time.

  Today, though: the hour of dinner. He knows she is in her room. The same dreary cell, on a hallway otherwise near-abandoned; the only light a window at its far end, narrow like an arrow slit. He approaches the door, hesitates. There was a time when he might have picked the lock but was afraid to speak to her. No, not afraid. Ashamed. In the days after the Storm, it seemed easier to stick to notes.

  Now the door is no longer locked.

  He knocks: softly, as on the door of an infirmary. Wary of troubling the sick. Eleanor answers almost at once, swings open the door, happy to see him.

  “Come in!”

  He steps in only far enough so he can close the door behind himself. She keeps distance, moves a step for each of his.

  “I was hoping you would come.”

  He notes how pale she is; how much her face has thinned. A role s
uggests itself, of friend. He resists it, this easy slipping into pattern; repeating phrases, gestures, learned from watching others show concern.

  “Why?” he says at last, anger curling out of him. “I don’t understand it.”

  She backs away from his Smoke. Her movements are awkward, even stiffer than before, her torso made bulky by ribs of steel. A wind-up key grows from her chest.

  “I’m back in harness, Mowgli. Broken like a horse.”

  [ 2 ]

  She explains it to him. How she went to talk to her uncle and afterwards found a box in her room. “Like a present, though it wasn’t wrapped.” It was not the old harness but a new contraption, refined in its design. And it fit very well. Her uncle must have had it built to her size.

  “I thought he had changed,” she explains, “and in a way he has. He’s grown cruel in his righteousness. Where before he wanted to correct, he now wants to punish. Only he won’t admit it to himself.” She sits down on her bed, painfully upright from the waist up. “He was so nice to me when we first talked.”

  “Take it off!” rages Nil. “Throw it out the window, run away. Fuck your uncle.”

  She smiles at the obscenity, smiles at him, his childishness, his seeping anger.

  “There was a note in the box, Mowgli. If I don’t wear it—if I smoke or don’t obey—he will kill one of the prisoners on one of those ships. A life for each smear of Soot he finds upon my linen. If I run, he will kill them all.” She pauses, watches him take it in. “It’s not just cruelty, you see. With Uncle, everything has purpose. He says I have a reputation—because of the Storm. There are rumours about what happened on the ship. Now he makes a point of walking around with me, loyal and tamed. I’ve become a part of his authority, rather than a challenge. And look”—she brushes her hand down the lush fabric of her skirt—“he’s given me dresses to wear. Silk and lace and thick white petticoats. And he in his dinner jacket. Like we are going dancing at a ball.”

  Nil nods, as though it makes sense to him; his skin is crawling with her calm. He is at the door before he notices he’s fleeing. She watches him; controlled in her sadness. It makes him want to run all the more.

  “What will you do, Eleanor?”

  “He’s planning something, Mowgli. Something monstrous. I will stop him.”

  “How?”

  When she does not answer, he makes himself step back into the room.

  “Smith is part of this,” he ventures.

  “Yes.”

  “But there’s someone else. Someone new.”

  “So I have heard. Have you seen her?”

  “From afar,” he answers, too quickly, as though she’s caught him at some indiscretion. “The only woman in this whole big place. She’s hard to miss.”

  “The only woman?” echoes Eleanor. “No, not quite.”

  [ 3 ]

  He stays another few minutes. In a sense it is easier, talking to her, now that she is bound. On the ship, during the Storm, she saw him as though naked: all the sickness of his soul dredged out of him, joining the Storm’s anger. For a moment he felt her, too, stripped to her failings, a helpless rage as deep as his. Then something else rose in her, like a whale from the deep. She ate it, her own darkness, then watched him (watched his ugliness: dressed while he lay bared) with the terrible indecency of a surgeon studying the broken body of his patient. Then she ate his darkness, too, leaving only their shared wants.

  He has avoided being alone in a room with her since.

  Now, though, with Eleanor locked away within that harness, Nil’s very gorge rising with the violence it implies, his sense of shame has lifted. Eleanor has seen him naked. But now her eyes have been gouged out.

  God help him, but it makes him feel safe.

  “Smith says Miss Cooper has come here from Minetowns,” Nil tells her now. “She is a Company woman, he says, only she’s playing some game of her own. Just like Smith. He’s desperate to find out what on earth it is that she is selling, and for what price.”

  “Whatever it is,” Eleanor replies, “it comes from India. Uncle has been talking about shipments. The first was lost at sea. The second—I think he’s waiting for news that it has sailed.”

  “What sort of shipment?”

  “I don’t know. But the ships are hers, I think—Miss Cooper’s. And they have captured Thomas Argyle, and are shipping him back, too.” She pauses briefly, studies him. Nil isn’t sure what emotion she finds written on his face. “And there is something else yet. Uncle has been seeking information on someone, far in the North. Someone he calls the Angel. He wants to know where he is. Does Smith know about this?”

  “I haven’t heard him mention it. He is in an odd mood. Buoyant one moment, and half in despair the next. Bustling about, writing letters, disappearing into the Company storehouse for hours at a time. At night he stays up and reads Hegel.”

  “And the beetle?”

  “He keeps it hidden in a box.” Nil hesitates, tries to put into words a recent observation. “Something’s wrong at the storehouse. Smith is nervous. Perhaps he thinks Renfrew wants to rob him, I don’t know.”

  They go on like that, comparing notes, filling one another in: standing in the middle of the room, two yards apart, conspirators not friends. Then Eleanor kicks him out.

  “Livingstone will be here soon to fetch me. Uncle is making a habit of it. Inviting me for an evening drink.”

  “Stop calling him that. It sounds like you like him. He’s a bastard. He’s making you wear that thing.”

  “Oh, he’s family,” she replies, calmly, without bile. “He made me the monster I am.”

  [ 4 ]

  Livingstone arrives within ten minutes of Mowgli’s leaving. Ten minutes within which she struggles to contain herself: turns the wheel upon her chest, to trap her grief. They did not touch, even in parting. She had not known how much she’d want to. Now steel ribs make literal her heartache.

  Then Livingstone is there with his breath of sweet. He leads her wordlessly. Her uncle’s study has been tidied, the desk pushed into a corner to make space for a card table set with a teapot, cakes, three cups and plates. He watches her gaze at the third cup.

  “Miss Cooper,” he explains. “She’s fashionably late.”

  Indeed she makes them wait another quarter hour. Eleanor has not seen her before, though she arrived at the Keep three or four days ago. She enters in a dress that makes Eleanor’s own look tasteless and overelaborate, the pretensions of another era: sleek and high-buttoned if very tight at waist and chest. The hair is pinned up but a strand has escaped; curls fetchingly down to one shoulder.

  “Lord Protector Renfrew,” she greets Eleanor’s uncle warmly. “And this, no doubt, is your famous niece—Minetowns is all abuzz with her story! But why put her in that awful thing? It’s frighteningly medieval. And will you look at these cakes! Perfectly ruinous for my waistline! Where do you get your marzipan in this day and age?”

  And truly, Miss Cooper is charming: not at all affected, but rather chirpy, funny, at ease with herself. She eats with great relish, and laughs at the icing sugar that ends up on the tip of her nose. She grows more serious when Renfrew leads the conversation to business matters.

  “I hear there’s trouble in India, Lady Cooper.”

  “There’s always trouble in India, Dr. Renfrew. You would be cantankerous if you went there. It’s just too bloody hot.”

  “Still, I have had a report of popular unrest. And your ship remains in harbour. It appears the harbour master is not granting it leave. A Company man, no less. Internal conflicts, is what I hear. Factions and power struggles. I do not much care for these reports.”

  “You worry too much, Dr. Renfrew. And look, we are boring your niece. Why don’t we discuss these matters later? In private?”

  “You need not worry a
bout my niece. She has my complete faith. And you no doubt have her fullest attention. Is that not so, Eleanor?”

  Eleanor hesitates, looks back and forth between the two of them: the former scholarship student who has risen to be king; and the daughter of a noble house who is rebuilding its fortunes. The Puritan and the flirt.

  “I do not know why I am here,” she says quietly. Then she asks, still in a tone so direct it brings a little pout of displeasure to Miss Cooper’s charming face, “I would like to know where your brother is.”

  “And what is your interest in Charles?”

  Eleanor pauses, fights down emotion, locks it in with a quarter turn of the wheel. “He helped me when I was a child. He helped me escape.”

  “Why yes, of course. So the story is true! The snow, the escape across the roof—it would make a lovely children’s book, I’ve often thought. That was the night of your…injury, Dr. Renfrew, was it not? Charles rescued your niece while you were being attacked by Julius Spencer.” She beams at them both, something dangerous mixed in with her charm. “Well, Eleanor, I imagine you must have been a little bit in love with Charles ever since. What a disappointment then that he has become such a rover. My mother and I felt we had no choice but to disinherit him. On grounds of insanity, actually—oh, it’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. He has become a sort of mystic, a holy fool. Left his beloved mistress—there are rumours of a child, though it may just as well be the other one’s—and took off to commune with Gales. Or so I have heard. Much the same is being said about our dear lost King, of course—and chances are he is rotting away in one of the Keep’s dungeons, while the Lord Protector here decides whether he can still be useful or not…”

  Miss Cooper trails off, ignoring Renfrew’s denial. Her focus remains on Eleanor. Eleanor returns her gaze.